Speakers
Tomás Díaz de la Rubia
Chief Research and Development Officer and Acting Principal Associate Director for Science and Technology, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Tomás Díaz de la Rubia is the Chief Research and Development Officer at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), responsible for the quality and strategic direction of the science and technology portfolio at LLNL. He is also the Principal Deputy in the Science and Technology Principal Directorate at LLNL, with a multidisciplinary staff of 3300 people. The focus of his scientific work has been the investigation, via large-scale computer simulation, of defects, diffusion, and microstructure evolution in materials in extreme environments.
He also was involved in the development of multiscale models of materials strength and aging in irradiation environments. He has published more than 150 peer-reviewed articles in the scientific literature. He belongs to the editorial board of five major scientific journals and continues to serve in numerous national and international panels. He was elected a fellow of the American Physical Society in 2002 and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2007. In addition to being a member of the Board of Directors of the Materials Research Society between 2002 and 2005, he was the Vice Chair (chair elect) of the Division of Computational Physics of the APS in 2008. Díaz de la Rubia received his B.S. (summa cum laude) in physics in 1984 and his Ph.D. also in physics in 1989 from the State University of New York where he received the presidential award for academic research.